


Mysterious Ways

by MagicWordNerd



Category: Homestuck, Medievalstuck - Fandom
Genre: Gen, If you're looking for that man broaden your horizons, Not a ship fic, Relationships will be a thing but not the focus of the story, feedback is welcome
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-14
Updated: 2017-04-16
Packaged: 2018-10-19 01:38:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,041
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10629474
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MagicWordNerd/pseuds/MagicWordNerd
Summary: The human kingdom and the troll kingdom have been at war for years. Dave Strider has never questioned this, and fights willingly against the bloodthirsty troll kingdom. However, when he is forced to trust a troll with his life, they discover a secret that threatens both kingdoms. Can they succeed in getting the two opposing kingdoms to work together to fight against it?





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is not a ship fic inherently! While I do ship Davekat and am considering various pairings, the romance, specifically one between Dave and Karkat(that may or may not happen), will not be the focus of the story. Dave and Karkat are just really fun main characters.  
> This is originally from my Quotev account, brought here for the lack of Homestucks on said website.

John Egbert sighed. He was sitting backwards in a chair, having a generally melancholy mood about him, and was watching his closest friend, Dave Strider, prepare for another battle with the opposing troll kingdom.  
Dave's room was a mess. The floor was covered in various items of clothing, all of them well-suited to fighting, and various weapons - mainly blades - were gathered in various places throughout the room. It was clear that the boy with the red eyes whom people whispered about where they thought he couldn't hear had a slight obsession with fighting.  
"What? Are you still on that, Egbert?" Dave asked as he searched his room for one of several daggers he liked to keep on him, just in case he was somehow disarmed of his sword (which he hadn't been, ever. Not in a real life-or-death fight, anyway).  
"Dave, you're going to get yourself killed one day. Most of the kingdom's knights die on the battlefield."  
"Do you really doubt me that much, John?"  
"No! I mean, you know I know you're a great fighter. But things happen, and...I just don't want you to go out their and die over..."  
"Over what?" Dave stopped and looked at John, red eyes still rather unsettling to John when his friend gave him that look, even after being friends for years.  
"Well, it doesn't seem like much more than nothing," John mumbled.  
"They all want to kill us, John."  
"It would seem that way when you're all out there fighting for your lives," John replied bitterly. "You probably seem that way to them."  
"So what would you suggest started all this?"  
"That's the thing! We don't know! No one knows! We just keep fighting, and fighting, and what's the point? When will someone win? What are the victors even winning?"  
Dave paused for a moment before he replied, "Well I'm not going to die fighting for it, so what's the use in you worrying, dough boy?"  
"Shut up," John replied as Dave grinned. John detested the thought of spending the rest of his life running his mother's bakery, and Dave had come up with the nickname to annoy him. It was pretty useful at moments like these, when otherwise Dave wouldn't have known what else to say. Because as much as he hated to admit it, he couldn't help but wonder. What if John was right?

~ ~ ~

Dave could see the trolls now as they advanced, clearly thinking themselves prepared. They were numerous, that was true, but they had no cunning - they were clearly not expecting the move the humans were about to make.  
The trolls were, in fact, nearly surrounded, which they couldn't see through the foliage of the thick forests surrounding them. There was a noticeable scent of rain from the deluge that had been going off and on for weeks now, preventing even the sharpest sense of smell any troll had from detecting them. The plan was to drive them toward a nearby gorge, effectively trapping them, and hopefully sending many of the trolls plunging into it to make up for the soldiers the humans lacked.  
Mere moments later, the two armies were in the thick of a battle. Dave struck down enemies left and right. His battalion (which was of about 350 soldiers, actually rather small, but enough for their job) was fighting in the middle of it all, jumping into the fray and sending trolls off the edge. However, first there was the issue of getting them to the edge.  
They quickly made headway. The element of surprise had the trolls fighting on the defensive, and human soldiers relied on skill much more than strength, taking down enemies quickly rather than with brute force. (Also, though the human kingdom had no knowledge of it, the troll kingdom had forced most of their population into the army, including lowbloods who were farmers or herders by profession, and many of them didn't have natural skill with any weapon.) Within minutes the humans had achieved their goal, and the first few trolls were sent sailing into the gorge.  
Dave charged further into the throng of soldiers, taking down trolls as he went. He narrowly dodged a blade through the skull from one female troll, though he had no time to feel shocked as he noted her blind, completely red eyes, and barely had time to even notice her manic, shark-toothed grin as he pressed forward.  
He was near the edge now. Dave heard trolls screaming as they were sent over the side, and several humans as well. There was no time to dwell on it now as he set his eyes on a male troll, short for the age he looked to be, and moved to either send him off the side or skewer him, whichever worked.  
Dave suddenly felt a jolt of panic rush through him as the ground beneath his feet gave way. He saw in the eyes of the troll he had been focused on the same fear he felt, an expression that until a moment ago Dave had expected to see directed at him as he ended the troll's life. He realized then the humans' tactical misstep - the rain that had been pouring down for so many days had made the sides of the gorge unstable. Holding the weight of thousands of soldiers? This was bound to happen, and while it would kill their enemies, it would kill the humans as well.

Karkat Vantas desperately grasped for something to cling to. He was not going to die like this - he wanted to die on the battlefield as a warrior, killed by an enemy's weapon, not a victim to Mother Nature's whims! The red-eyed human who it seemed had been about to try to kill him was still looking at him as though intent on it. If nothing else, humans certainly were stubborn, but this was something else.  
Both troll and human, as well as hundreds of other soldiers, were sent over the edge, and all the two saw before they hit the bottom was the wall of mud that had given way beneath their feet coming down to meet them.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "'Give it a break, man,' Dave told him. 'Look. I hate your guts just as much as you must hate mine, but be realistic here. How likely is it you could get out of here on your own? C'mon. Truce. Just to get out of here alive?'"  
> Despite Dave's best efforts to take his friend's advice, he and Karkat don't get along very well.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry the first few paragraphs of this chapter are kind of sucky. It took me two days to figure out how exactly I wanted to write the first two, and that was just me deciding, "Nope, forget it, I'm writing this, it's getting done." So here's Chapter 2, sucky introduction and all!

The rain was what woke him.  
Dave Strider made a noise of irritation as drops of water pelted his face. For a moment he wondered why he was laying out here in the rain. Then he remembered. A moment later, another realization came to him: he was still alive.  
Despite the odds having been defied in his miraculous survival, it would have been even more impossible for him to have survived unscathed. He was fairly confident that he had broken several ribs on his left side, and probably something in his lower left leg; he wasn't exactly sure what; he was still somewhere beyond the reach of full consciousness and that whole part of his leg hurt.  
He let himself lay there and just took a moment to observe his situation. A wall of mud blocked the canyon to one side (he was just to the side of it; how, he wondered, had it possibly missed him?), no doubt thousands of soldiers killed by it. The only other way to go was in the direction of the troll kingdom. Talk about stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Something shifted underneath him. Dave jumped up, ignoring the pain in his side and his leg, and drew one of his daggers while looking around for his sword (probably buried under the rubble, he realized grimly), all before he even got a good look at the troll he'd landed on, the same one he'd been about to kill.

Dave relaxed somewhat as he realized that, thankfully, the troll was as much injured as he was, if not more. He sat down as the troll awoke, though Dave kept his weapon drawn, ready for anything the troll might try.

Curses flew from the troll's mouth, even as he was in the process of waking.

Dave watched this with a strange curiosity. He'd never interacted with a troll outside of battle, had never taken a prisoner nor had a need to. His conversation with John still fresh in his mind, he mentally shrugged and decided maybe he'd give this a shot for the sake of strength in numbers. He sat back and waited for the short troll to notice him.

All in all, it took longer than Dave would have expected from a troll kingdom knight. The short troll lay there without taking in his surroundings for maybe more than five minutes, plenty of time for some cavern-dwelling creature to notice him and come out of its hiding place to gobble him up, or even more likely, for a surviving adversary such as himself to sneak up on him and kill him.

It was this troll's lucky day  that John thought about such weird stuff, and felt free to say such things aloud, Dave thought right before the troll finally took notice of him, drawing the sickles he'd somehow managed to keep ahold of.

Suddenly Dave was defending against a flurry of sloppy blows (which were made with only one arm, Dave noted) with as many sloppy dodges. Stupid damn leg.  
After a couple of moments, though, he managed to get through an opening and throw the troll flat on his back, drawing from him an uff noise, and he started to get back up again as though to try again.  
And huh, there was Dave's sword, half-buried under the wall of sludge. The human took a moment to grab it before he turned back to the troll.  
"Give it a break, man," Dave told him. "Look. I hate your guts just as much as you must hate mine, but be realistic here. How likely is it you could get out of here on your own? C'mon. Truce. Just to get out of here alive?"  
"The fuck do I need you for?" the troll replied, glaring at Dave as though it were a personal insult to suggest he even speak to a human.  
Dave shrugged. "Your choice, man. I'll leave you down here for the beasts who live in whatever caves are around down here. The hell are you gonna kill the way you are? And you can't exactly run, it's not like I can't see you're shittier-looking than I am."  
The human was right, Karkat knew, somewhere deep in some part of his mind he refused to acknowledge. He could see how the human favored his left side and leg, but he himself felt like a pureed mess of blood and bone. The human was more than glad to point out how noticeable it was himself, too. "I mean damn, your face is a mess." This was true. Karkat could hardly see out of his right eye; he had probably broken something in his skull somewhere. He'd probably smacked his face on something on the way down, no way if he'd actually faceplanted the ground he'd still be alive. "And don't think I didn't notice that your arm's pretty much useless." Probably a few things were broken in his shoulder. Also definitely his collarbone. Ow. Maybe his shoulder blade too. "Hell, that whole side of you's pretty messed up." Nothing broken besides the aforementioned, but yea, the rest of him was pretty fucking banged up. He wondered, much like Dave had, how was he not hurt worse, or dead?  
"Okay fine. Fucking shut up. I'll come with you if you need a babysitter that badly."  
"Ever heard the phrase strength in numbers?"  
God that look the human was giving Karkat was creepy. Maybe it was the guy's eyes. Karkat were pretty sure that wasn't a normal human eye color. Either way, it was creepy as fuck.  
"Yea, yea. Guess we'd getter get moving then, oh great and mighty leader fuckass."  
Dave just smirked at Karkat and started walking away. As much as a guy with a broken leg using his sword for a crutch could walk, anyway. Karkat followed, stubbornly limping along with nothing holding him up but his own willpower.  
It was still raining.  
They continued this way for maybe half an hour, rain continuing the whole way, before finally Karkat gave up their stubborn game of daring each other to wimp out first. He was hurt, he was tired, he was wet and he was cold, and he just wanted to lay down somewhere and sleep for a fucking month. What really caused him to give in was the sight of a cave, one of many that had been made by the same river that had made this gorge. Shelter, dammit.  
"Okay, fuck this whole shitty passive-aggressive thing we're doing," Karkat said finally after what had felt like hours. "Fuck whatever creatures of the dark are hiding in there. I'll be the fucking wimp and fucking say it. Let's just stop already."  
"Really? You can't go any more?" Dave probably shouldn't tease the only other person he could find to rely on right now, even if said person was a troll and, might he add, a complete dick, and it was really making him question if they really weren't all like this, so he just had to get in his head a little bit.  
"Oh, fuck you."  
Also his reactions were pretty gratifying since it would do more harm than good right now to kill him and this was the most he could do, mess with his head.  
"Alright," Dave shrugged. The troll blinked in surprise, then headed toward shelter.    
To be honest, Dave was exhausted himself. But until the troll gave in, he wouldn't have, because he's better than some fucking troll - oh wait, he's doing exactly the thing John was telling him was dumb. What did John know anyway, though?

But now there was this tiny little seed of doubt in his mind whispering that everything he knew might just maybe be wrong, and as much as he said no, of course that was dumb, there it was, that tiny little bit of doubt.  
Several minutes later, Dave was really wishing for a nice, warm fire. That would be great. Dave sat leaning up against one wall of the cave, injured leg stretched out straight in front of him, and the troll was nursing his broken arm while trying to avoid letting Dave see him do it. He could tell the troll was wishing for warmth as well; the guy was shivering, as Dave was(could the troll tell?), and Dave couldn't help but feel a little bit of empathy right then. He shoved it away the moment he recognized it for what it was.  
"Hey," Dave said, and winced mentally because he sounded downright pathetic. "Still dunno your name. It'd be nice to have something to call you by, you know?"  
He got a grunt in response.  
"Mine's Dave."

Dave's attempt at conversation fell flat, and silence returned, broken only by the pounding of rain outside. A while later it was interrupted by a flash of lightning and, almost immediately afterward, the boom of thunder, as loud as Dave had heard it in the past three weeks. The rain started coming down harder. The ground, which was more rock than soil at the bottom in contrast to the top, had been collecting water that had yet to find a place to sink into the ground, and now it started flooding their cave, much to both the human and the troll's dismay.

Neither of them wanted to say it. Neither of them wanted to get up in the slightest, and though they wouldn't admit it, weren't sure they had the energy.

Karkat just sighed a weary sigh. He looked at the human (whom he refused to refer to as "Dave") to see that he was thinking the same thing.

They both made the decision to be the tougher guy at the same time and stood, both hearing suppressed noises of pain from the other and pretending they didn't make them themselves.

In some sort of silent agreement they headed farther back into the cave, away from the pooling water and the lightning and thunder, both too weary to even try to argue or talk whatsoever anymore.

They had all but forgotten about the beasts that prowled these caves.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "'I would suggest...' Suddenly there was a sword against John's captor's neck. 'you let my friend go.'"  
> Dave has been missing for three months. He shows up again with some new friends in tow and a mission to complete.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was going to make this chapter pretty long, but it was taking too long to write already, so here's another short chapter. The next one will be longer, I promise!

Jane Egbert quietly left the bakery, which she ran with her son, careful not to wake the boy. She was worried for him, had been for a while, after his best friend Dave had "disappeared" three months back. He was more than likely dead, but no one, least of all Jane, dared tell John that.

She then headed down an alley, and then another one, taking twists and turns that seemed random and impossible to keep track of. Anyone who saw her might think she was trying to avoid being followed.

Of course, that was because she was.

Jane stopped suddenly, as though on a whim. However, one would realize after a time, should they stop to watch her, that it was no whim. She was waiting for someone. After a long while of waiting, two people showed themselves.

"Hush, we have to be quiet," a woman who was perhaps in her sixties said to a child of about eight. The child had a noticeable limp, and Jane stood more alert as they approached.

"Quickly, I fear we may not have much time," Jane told them in a hushed tone.

"I can't thank you enough, dear..." the other woman said. "Now that my husband is dead, and I am old, I can neither afford a doctor for my grandchild nor can either of us work to afford even to live...If we're caught - "

"We won't be," Jane interrupted. Then she began doing what she did best.

She healed.

She placed her hands over the child's leg, which had clearly been broken before and healed awkwardly, and her hands glowed softly as she performed her magic. Of course, magic had been banned entirely long ago - most didn't even know of its existence. Jane had begun offering her services to anyone who was too poor to afford a doctor not long after her husband and daughter had disappeared, and she had discovered these powers of hers. Some of them gave her all they could afford to. some gave her a few coins for her trouble. Some gave her nothing, or could give her nothing. But Jane turned no one away.

They sat there for perhaps half an hour, the child marveling, the grandmother nervous and alert, Jane intensely focused, all of them deathly silent.

Jane let out a quiet sigh, removing her hands, and the child jumped up, jumping around on newly-healed legs. The child giggled, and the grandmother shushed them. The woman gave Jane several coins, apologized for not having more to give, and the two began to leave. 

"Agh! Hey, let me go! Let go!"

"John," Jane breathed. "Go! Run! Get out of here!" she yelled at the woman and her grandchild, who obeyed instantly.

They were gone before the soldiers found Jane. She hoped she could keep the soldiers' attention long enough for the two to get away.

"Surrender now," said one soldier, apparently the leader, "or the boy dies." One of the solders had John, who despite being heavily outnumbered (there were seven of them) was still struggling against his captor.

As  a show of the reality of the threat, the soldier holding John put a sword to his throat, stopping his struggling instantly. Instead he opted to say to his mother, "Go. I'll be fine, you have to go - "

The soldier's grip on John tightened, and the sword's tip was put against his skin.

Jane gave her son a pained look, and turned to reply to the soldier.

"Unfortunately for you, the lady will be coming with us," said a voice from behind Jane. She would have recognized it anywhere. Her eyes widened.

"We have you furrounded and outnumpurred!" a troll girl's voice added from somewhere in the dark.

"Trolls!" one of the soldiers hissed, raising his sword.

"I would suggest..." Suddenly there was a sword against John's captor's neck. "you let my friend go."

Suddenly all hell broke loose. The leading soldier lunged at the boy who was threatening his colleague, and the other soldier's grip on John slackened, allowing him to get free.

"Dave!" John exclaimed gleefully.

"Let's try getting the hell out of here before the tearful reunion, huh?" Dave replied as he deftly parried the lead soldier's blows. He ducked out of the way as a troll pounced at the soldier (for pouncing was the best way to describe it; after all, the girl had giant metal claw-things on her hands), forcing him to move awkwardly to dodge, and the troll still caught his ear, leaving three bleeding scratches.

The soldier cursed under his breath as he realized the rogues had him cornered and all of his men separated. He glared at the human and the troll and ran off, followed by his cohorts upon realizing their leader had abandoned them.

Dave was promptly caught up in a tight hug by his best friend. "Dave! I can't believe - where did you - you disappeared for three months! Where the hell have you been?"

"Long story," Dave replied. "I'll tell you on the way back."

"And you're fighting alongside trolls now? That's so cool! Did you start some sort of revolution or something?" John continued, starry-eyed.

"More like joined one," Dave replied. "Look, let me just start from the beginning, right? So you probably heard about that whole landslide that killed pretty much everybody fighting that day? Yeah. Well, I got trapped down in that gorge with this asshat troll, his name's Karkat, you'll meet him later. He's cool. So we were in this cave since it had started raining, and we ended up in a pretty fucked up situation..."


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "'Shit - ' Dave jumped to his feet, instantly regretted it, and reached for his sword to fight anyway. Karkat was on his feet in the same moment, sickles in hand and taking note of the human's wincing and the fogginess of his own thoughts.  
> Neither of them were going to be much use in a fight.  
> They were probably going to die."  
> Dave and Karkat ended up in a pretty fucked up situation before they ended up with their new allies.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> How do I do italics on here? I'm used to Quotev, help please.

Three months ago...

As Dave and Karkat headed deeper into the cave, they were thrust into near complete darkness. At least they weren't getting soaked, Dave mused. Or at least no more than they already were. His wounds were even more likely to get infected, Dave realized bitterly, without a way to make a fire to get dry.

The cave led them farther down, closing in on them so that Dave and Karkat were walking side by side, neither caring enough to keep the distance between them. Dave's leg finally overruled his sheer will and sense of pride and Dave decided there was no way he was going any farther.

"Figure we're okay here," he mumbled before he collapsed to the ground and just lay there.

Karkat followed, handling himself more gingerly. He tried to sleep. He was so goddamn exhausted it should have been easy enough. But he couldn't let go of the thought that he was going to die down here and no one would care because he was just a dumb mutant and he would have been culled if the Condesce hadn't needed every troll she could get her hands on for this dumb war and what was this war even for? All he ever saw was trolls dying, they never won anything, they just all killed each other and they didn't even know what they were fighting for...And he was going to die down here not knowing what he was fighting for - 

Shit. The human was staring at him. How much of that had he said out loud?

"Pretty much everything," Dave replied. "You sound like someone I know. Except more depressed and angry."

Karkat ignored Dave and turned away from him. The human still stared, though. 

The troll didn't seem to notice. For some reason this worried Dave a bit.

"The fuck is that?" Dave said suddenly as he looked farther down in the cavern and saw a harsh green glow emanating from...something. It was pretty far away, but it was approaching fast and it sounded bestial and big.

"Shit - " Dave jumped to his feet, instantly regretted it, and reached for his sword to fight anyway. Karkat was on his feet in the same moment, sickles in hand and taking note of the human's wincing and the fogginess of his own thoughts.

Neither of them were going to be much use in a fight.

They were probably going to die.

Both human and troll gaped as the creature came into plain view. It appeared to be in the shape of a dog, however it had no defining features besides its shape and glowed with an unnatural greenish light. And it was nine feet tall, its back scraping the roof of the narrow cave they were in.

Both boys heard a wordless exclamation from behind them, and suddenly there were four people between them and the monstrous canine.

"Bec! Sit!" a girl's voice ordered.

The beast sat.

"Wow! Good thing we found you when we did!" one of the other girls exclaimed. (They were all girls, Karkat realized, one of them a troll, the rest human.) "You guys were really hard to find once it started raining. Now I'm all wet..." The girl seemed rather exuberant despite this. She seemed nice enough, Karkat decided.

"We can save the pleasantries for later," the final human said, a particular-looking blonde girl who seemed to be examining them closely for...something.

Karkat didn't remember the rest of the conversation. The girl who seemed to have command over the strange beast sent it on its way. He gave answers to simple questions on autopilot as the group led him and his human companion out of the cave and the gorge.

Then he was on a horse. When had he gotten on a horse? The troll girl was sitting behind him, watching him more than wherever she was going.

Dave glanced over at the troll now and then. Having been assured that where they were going, he and Karkat (whose name he'd learned when the troll had absentmindedly muttered it in answer to a question) wouldn't be enemies, and having mulled over it a bit himself the past hour as they rode, he'd decided a look of concern now and then wouldn't be out of place, especially considering how out of it the guy looked. Of course, Dave supposed he didn't look too well himself, but at least he was coherent.

Luckily the trees surrounding them blocked out most of the rain, as it had let up a considerable amount in the last bit. The girl riding with Dave (her name was Jade, she said, and she looked oddly like John) had been cursing herself the whole way about not having any medical supplies with her.

"Why can't mew just telepurrt us there fur, Jade?" the troll, who seemed to have a fondness for cat puns, asked.

"Telepurrt - I mean, teleport? The fuck are you goin' on about?" Dave asked.

"Because we're as likely to end up back where we started or even in the middle of a troll or human village as we are to get where we're going, Nepeta," Jade replied. "Witch powers are complicated, and Space powers especially have to be used responsibly and carefully while I'm still learning," she explained as though it were something that had been told to her a million times.

"Again I say: the fuck?" Dave put in.

"It's...complicated," the girl named Roxy put in. There was something strangely welcoming about her, Dave thought. Jade and Nepeta were nice, true enough, much more than many people Dave had met, but there was something somewhat intimidating about them. Not that Dave was necessarily intimidated by them! They just...seemed more like fighters than anything else, and Roxy just seemed more ready to be kind to people in general than to physically defend them. Not that none of them couldn't do both, but...ugh, he was rambling in his own head.

That girl Rose was another story. She was just generally aloof and honestly somewhat disinterested in Dave or Karkat's well-being as opposed to...something. She was just observing, just watching them as though she was trying to figure out the workings of a couple of machines.

Dave's thoughts were cut off as he noticed a house come into view. It was small, with space enough for perhaps four or five rooms, but it was the first house they'd come across this entire time, and Jade announced that it was their destination.

Jade greeted a man who looked much like her (and by extension John as well) warmly and introduced him as her father, Jake. Luckily the man took Dave's own less than enthusiastic self-introduction in stride, seeming to understand completely and taking no offense. The guy seemed pretty harmless, in fact, in contrast to his daughter. As Dave and Karkat were led inside, Jake told Dave he was a Page of Hope before remembering Dave had no idea what that was and apologizing, promising it would be explained when Dave was feeling more up to comprehending it.

Dave looked around the small, lived-in looking abode. The room they'd entered into consisted of a small kitchen area with a rather table and definitely more chairs than one man and his daughter would need, eight was definitely too much for such a small house (did they do this sort of thing often?). Two doorways led off into two other rooms from the wall opposite Dave, perpendicular to the wall the table was along and the bare wall opposite it. At least one of these rooms was presumably a bedroom.

Jade led him into one of them and his assumption was proven correct. In it there was a fireplace and two beds, one of which she made him sit on to dress his wounds, and multiple times she had to tell him to stop fidgeting.

"So, do you want something to eat or would you rather sleep first...?"

"Wouldn't be surprised if I fell asleep face-first onto the plate," Dave replied. He laid back and stretched out on the bed (which was way more comfortable than the stone floor of a cave) and was asleep in moments.

Jade took a few moments to light a fire in the fireplace and left him to his rest.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know I promised a longer chapter on this one but I just can't seem to write anything longer than five pages in a week. Better less more often than more less often in my opinion, anyway. I think Sunday will be my day for updates now, but no promises.


End file.
